Tag: Great North Weekend

I’ve been conscious recently that ‘race review’ is probably a bad title for these posts, because I’m not really doing much reviewing of the race itself – more reflecting on my own race and what went well and what went badly. As such, I’ll start with a few thoughts on the GNR 2022. It was a very different atmosphere at the start with all the reflection and observance of the national mourning period, but once we were underway – down to South Shields on the traditional route for the first time in three years – it felt like it had never been away. I did miss the Red Arrows, but I’m sure they’ll be back next year when – hopefully – we can finally have a totally normal GNR again.

My training had mostly gone well. I missed a few weeks early in the plan, as I realised I had started training again too soon after the Edinburgh Marathon and needed a bit more time to recover, but I had really pulled it back over the last six weeks or so – I did all my long runs and developed a good speedwork routine by getting some initial miles done in my new pair of speed shoes, joining the local social run group on Fridays (their easy pace is a fairly good lick for me!) and attempting some faster parkrun times. I also started medication for my ankylosing spondylitis, which was working really well and meant that my lower back, hips, glutes and sciatic nerves didn’t seem to be stiff and sore anymore. Best of all, I found a new and promising fuelling strategy that didn’t make me feel sick (Clif Shot Blokz instead of gels). Unfortunately my strength training routine did suffer as I was so busy with travelling and other things over the summer, and it became really difficult to find that half hour to fit it in.

It was really only the last week of the taper that I started to become nervous about possible niggles that might affect the race. My back pain had been a little bit twingy on some of my long runs during training, but not to the extent that it was affecting my running – it was just a bit of background annoyance that I could ignore. However, I really felt it properly seize up just after I sprinted for the line at Pendle parkrun, eight days before GNR day. I was worried, but it returned to its vague background level for my six-miler along the canal the following morning, so I assumed it would be fine for the race.

That afternoon, I got in the car to drive back from Lancashire to Newcastle. A few hours later, I climbed out of the driver’s seat to find myself with killer runner’s knee out of absolutely nowhere! No idea whether it was the sprint at Pendle parkrun, the dodgy camber along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal towpath or just straining a bit too hard to keep the clutch in the right place during the drive, but I’ve never had it just appear like that before! Panic stations that evening, but as usual with runner’s knee for me, I found during my next few days of short runs that it didn’t actually hurt during running – just when I sat down and stiffened up. However, my back pain was noticeable all week, probably because my form was thrown out by unconsciously compensating for my knee. I did a lot of extra strength training and massage gun work during the week, focusing on my knee and back – and I found that race pace was comfortable and unproblematic on my short runs – but while the knee pain had dissipated by Friday, the back pain clearly wasn’t going away. I just had to hope that it would remain a background-level pain and wouldn’t cause any stiffening during the weekend.

I deliberately took my last shakeout run (en route to parkrun volunteering) very slowly. However, I found that I was stiff and slow during the walk around the Jesmond Dene course and back home – and even more stiff and slow on the walk from home to the GNR start area the following morning. It wasn’t promising, but I always see races through, so I set off in the hope that I would at least be able to stay steady.

The first couple of miles were fine. I started off a bit fast, but settled into my pace by the second mile, and if I’d been able to keep going like that it would have been a great day. However, by mile three everything between mid-back and mid-thigh had seized up into one giant inflexible piece, which was causing a lot of other issues further down, especially with my feet. I had no choice but to switch to a run-walk strategy to mitigate the pain. I was determined to keep running sometimes, as I hadn’t mentally managed to do that during the second half of the Edinburgh Marathon, but the race for me between miles three and twelve was about a 2:1 walk-run ratio. I couldn’t walk briskly either, and I had a lot of concerned comments during my walk periods, as I must have looked really strange trying to walk in my seized-up state. Running was an awkward shufflejog, but at least there were a few other people doing that too.

Following this strategy, I was able to stay steady-ish (if extremely slow) – and I did manage to shufflejog the whole last mile along the seafront – but I was in a lot of pain and went to a lot of dark places during the many hours it took me to complete the course. I was seriously questioning if I should continue with running, and to be honest I am still having those thoughts three days later. It just felt so fruitless. I had trained for this race and yet I might as well have not trained at all – I would have been no slower, and possibly faster as I wouldn’t have aggravated my back pain in the last few weeks of the plan. I had desperately wanted to get close to my PB again, and I ended up well over an hour outside it. I had two A races this year – both of which were really important to me – and my medical issues ruined both of them.

Mentally, I was looking forward to the post-GNR period as I had decided a long time ago that it would be my last race of 2022 – I wanted a good long rest in the autumn before starting marathon training again in the new year – but I’ve just felt horrible this week. I don’t feel like I properly ended my season, my medal and t-shirt don’t feel earned, and I desperately want another chance to get the result I feel I should have had – but I just don’t think it would be sensible, mentally or physically, to sign up for another race this year.

I’m also really quite worried about next year’s goal races – spring marathon and then GNR again. It was mostly the back pain that did me in at Edinburgh this year, but there were a lot of other issues with that race – injuries during training, nausea caused by fuelling – that contributed to the wheels coming off. At the GNR, it was the spondylitis alone. I can do everything I can to try and mitigate it, but I can never guarantee that I won’t suffer from it on the day of a race. I suppose I’ll always have that worry now, and a lot of it really is down to luck.

Three things I can do and will continue to do to try and mitigate the spondylitis:

• Keep taking the medication, as it does work 95% of the time
• Prioritise my strength training, which means not booking as much travel as I have this year (travelling is the number one cause of training interference for me)
• Lose weight (as when I was at my target weight I barely suffered with this issue at all) – it’s a slow process but I am determined

Three things to take away from this race and training block:

• Spring marathon needs to be early May at the latest as I need time to recover in between training blocks – Edinburgh and GNR were too close together for proper recovery
• I will continue running with the social group as it’s both great speed training and a good source of motivation due to the friendly people there
• No sprint finishes at parkrun in the fortnight before the race! (I just really wanted that Pendle PB…)

I’m in the Pyrenees this week, where there are no such things as flat roads. Walking and running on the hills is hard with my back issues, and I think I would have been able to enjoy the trip more if I hadn’t gone straight after the GNR. As such, not going on travels straight after a race is probably a good lesson to learn as well. Nevertheless, it is a calm and beautiful place for reflecting on things.

I’m not quitting running just yet. Apart from anything else, it’s only twelve days until my ‘comma day’ – the thousandth day of my daily run streak – and I want to continue post-1,000 as it’s another good source of motivation. But there are a few things I need to think about this winter, and a few changes I need to make.

Finally getting round to reviewing a virtual race from last September – one of the highlights of my running season in 2020!

I keep referring to this race officially – in Strava logs and the like – as ‘Virtual Great North Run 2020’, as it keeps things neat. However, I fervently hope that there will only ever be one ‘Virtual Great North Run’, that the race can go back to normal(ish) in 2021, and that appending the ‘2020’ will forever be unnecessary!

For most of 2020, despite the fact that in-person races had to cease along with everything else when we went into lockdown in March, I avoided virtual races. Virtual races have been a thing since long before the pandemic – the idea is that you pay the ‘race entry’ fee, run the distance wherever you like, send in your Strava log or similar as proof, and receive a medal in the post for your medal hanger/kitchen drawer/wherever you keep your medals. I’ve never been keen on the idea, because in normal circumstances I don’t see the point. If I’m paying a race entry fee, I want the experience of a real race – the crowds, the adrenaline, the excitement, the music, the fact that I automatically go faster when running with other people, the cheering spectators, the sights along the route, the atmosphere of the finish line… I could go on and on. I really, really miss real races 🙁

For some people, though, virtual races are ideal. There are people who can’t attend races on Sunday mornings due to other commitments, or who don’t like being in crowds – so it’s great that virtual races exist and can cater to these people. I’m just not the target audience, in normal circumstances.

However, we are far from normal circumstances.

The big coronavirus-related anxiety for me over the summer was the question of whether the rescheduled October date for the London Marathon would be going ahead. In a nutshell, as I already blogged lots and lots about this at the time: they took ages to announce; they eventually announced it was going virtual for 2020; I was able to defer my ‘real London Marathon’ place to 2021; I also accepted the invitation to run the virtual race in 2020 as I wanted to do it as a ‘mile(ish) every hour for 24 hours’ challenge. Sorted. I had signed up for my very first virtual race.

The Great North Run had cancelled their in-person race and announced they were going virtual for 2020 quite some time before the London announcement. When this announcement was first made (in June, I think?), I didn’t expect to do the virtual. Every cancelled race I had originally been signed up for in 2020 had invited me to do a virtual version in exchange for a race entry fee, and I hadn’t taken any of them up on the offer – because, as explained above, I don’t normally see the point in virtual races.

However, after signing up for the Virtual London Marathon, I felt that it would be a good idea to commit myself to a half marathon length run, as it would be good training – even though I knew I would be running the marathon in a different way that wouldn’t require quite as much all-in-one-go endurance. I had kept meaning to run half marathon length runs over the summer, but none of them had ever transpired due to lack of motivation, so I decided to sign up to the Virtual GNR in order to make sure that I actually did it.

The other reason was that the excitement of planning my 24-hour challenge had made me realise how much I was missing races. A virtual race, while still a glorified training run in my world, would at least help to give some structure to my running over the next couple of months.

A few days after signing up, I happened to bump (not literally, I am a good social distancer) into a running friend while out on my Sunday long run, and as a result was invited to join the informal Sunday GNR training runs that were being organised by members of the local social run group. I’d attended a couple of the group’s formal runs around late February, just before everything shut down, but hadn’t realised that there were still some informally-organised socially distanced runs going on. (They’ve had to stop again since the lockdowns have become stricter over the autumn and winter, sadly!)

I enjoyed the Sunday training runs, which were at a pace that was a bit faster than my usual solo bumbling, but manageable for me, and decided to run the actual race with the group as well. It was a great atmosphere at our ‘starting area’, with perhaps fifteen or twenty people from the group all running in a socially distanced way (this was before even the ‘rule of six’ came in, let alone the return to full lockdown… so much has changed again in the last few months!).

The group’s starting pace on the day was a little fast for me, it turned out. The first 5k of the race was the fastest I’d run since before parkrun shut down, and the first 10k of the race was a lifetime 10k PB for me of 1:03:30. This is really promising in terms of my aim to manage a sub-hour 10k in 2021… but was absolutely not something I should have been doing in the first half of a half marathon! I was focusing too much on keeping up with the group rather than running at my own pace – and, as I did know the route, I should maybe have told them to go ahead and fallen back to a more comfortable pace for me.

As a result, I burnt out and fell apart a bit in the second half of the race. The rest of the group gradually disappeared, and at about ten or eleven miles in I told group leader Alan (who was lovely and kept waiting for me) that he could go ahead and I’d finish a bit later. The last couple of miles were pretty difficult and slow and I kept taking walk breaks, which I hadn’t needed to do in a half marathon for some time. Geth came to meet me at about twelve and a half miles, and I just about managed to run-walk to the end of the planned route. My official time as measured by the GNR app was 2:25:29 – only a couple of minutes slower than my PB from the Inverness half in the different world that was early March, so I had to take that as a victory given everything that had happened in 2020! I stopped my watch at about 2 hours 29 minutes once it said I’d done the full half marathon distance, and I think I ran over the planned route finishing line at about 2 hours 32 minutes. All of those times were faster than any other half I’ve done apart from Inverness, so in terms of finish time, I can’t complain.

I was a little disappointed with myself about the pacing as I like to finish strong in races, but to some extent it was out of my control. I originally planned to do another half marathon distance run before the end of the year, just to see what I could do when completely in charge of my own pacing, but I ended up needing a couple of months to recover from my 24-hour challenge/Virtual London Marathon. I need to build up again over the first few months of 2021.

Besides, I’ll also be focusing on 10k training for the next couple of months, with the aim of being ready to get that sub-hour result later this year. It doesn’t look likely that I’ll be doing any real races any time soon… but it turns out a virtual race isn’t the end of the world, so I’ve signed up to do a virtual 10k later in January.

I still can’t wait to get back to real races!